Teen Animorphs
by CalliopeMused
Summary: A short look at the Animorphs series as it might have happened with Teen Titans characters (and Ax).


_For any other '90s/'00s people out there, here's a fusion of two of my favorite series. __This story is very sparse with supporting details, so those unfamiliar with the Animorphs series might not understand all references._

** Teen Animorphs**

Her name was Rachel Marie Roth.

The thing was, Rachel wasn't even the best of them when it came to morphing. It had been too strange for her, even with all the science fiction books she had read during her distinctly solitary lunch periods. Garfield, of all of them, had taken to it like a duck morph took to water. He knew animals, and was always the first to sort through instincts. He had literally flown circles around them on their first wobbly flights, and still pulled the kind of aerial stunts on falcon wings that made the others wince on (human) instinct.

Victor was a close second, but he had grown up with animals. He was Garfield's best friend, and his parents' second-best assistant. Garfield always went to his place, because out back Victor had the barn. Garfield understood animals better than he understood most people, and his parents were grooming Garfield to be the best possible candidate for veterinary school. Victor was more of an engineer, but his parents let him tinker with all the out-dated equipment and try his hand at building new things.

Richard was only interested in morphing for the practical purposes, and he was the reason they all stayed on task. Kori had known him forever, and she loved fighting. She was the nicest of all of them, but she had a competitive streak two miles wide. Even then, she hadn't been the one to draw Rachel into their odd little circle of friends. Garfield had coaxed Rachel into lending him a book, and had been granted the rare honor of following her to her house and waiting on the front porch. If they had made it, he would have stuck precisely to their bargain. Rachel was viciously independent, but she had made a few comments in class that proved she had the complete published works of Darwin on her bookshelf, made to replicate the original printing. Garfield would have done a tap dance on her porch to get a look at just one chapter.

Instead, they had taken the shortcut through the lot, and now everything had changed. They were fighting against a mostly-invisible alien invasion, they still didn't know what they were doing, and Rachel's independence was more predictable than Garfield's bad jokes or Richard's obsessive plotting. Garfield and Richard occasionally took a break. She wouldn't accept help from anyone, not even the friendly blue alien they'd found. Ax had an annoying habit of calling Richard a prince, of all things, but breaking him of that verbal tic was more effort than it was worth. The others were faintly jealous about just how quickly Garfield had bonded with Rachel, but maybe her problem wasn't that she wanted to be alone. Maybe her problem was that she didn't like humans.

She certainly spent enough time in other forms, and her favorite was the bright-eyed raven that Victor's parents had kept for observation. That had been the one time she (or anyone) beat Garfield when it came to gaining the trust of an animal. She had ignored the bird totally while it was in its defensive posture—flat on its back, claws and beak ready to tear any offending flesh right off. When it finally trusted them enough to stand on its own in the close-barred cage, Rachel had offered tidbits of meat without an appropriate fear for her fingers. Any damage done could be mended by morphing and then morphing back, maybe, but she didn't even flinch when the raven dove for her fingers with a knife-sharp beak. Soon enough, the raven consented for her to run a finger down the side of its neck, and then she had it. She had the form that seemed to take up most of her time, because she definitely wasn't showing up at school any more. The worst part was that the counselors weren't surprised, the teachers didn't bother calling her name at attendance, and she vanished even from the records within weeks.

Maybe she let Garfield and Ax the closest because they understood why someone could like another body more. She made the effort to use her other forms well, and to fight efficiently, but no morph drew her like the raven. It might have been that she had earned that form for herself, or maybe that the raven had the potential to maim fingers even when caged. Maybe she had fallen in love with the bird's wary, proud eyes. Whatever it was, she spent most of her time as a raven, and Ax and Garfield were the most likely to be with her. No one else could use the mind of the raven with their own thoughts, and keep up with the way her conversations shifted to posture and body language even as she read the people that passed in her view.

She had nowhere to call home but adamantly refused to stay with any of her newfound friends. Richard and Kori tried together and failed spectacularly. She had snapped at Garfield for the first time in weeks when he offered. When Victor carefully pointed out that his parents would hire a live-in assistant, room and board in exchange for part-time help in the barn, she thought about it. His parents, though, had balked and insisted that if she stayed with them she had to go to school. They wouldn't hear anything about online equivalency courses or independent study for AP exams and then a G.E.D. Rumor had it that Rachel ran with the wrong crowd, and those stories weren't exactly put down as lies when she had no home and no family looking for her.

They didn't know if they could forgive themselves, even with that strong and honest effort. She was their friend, and they hadn't helped her. They hadn't found the way to earn her trust. Even Victor's parents felt guilty, afterward, that the girl had stayed with them for a night and left without a token protest when they believed what everyone else had said. The entire town said the girl would steal anything that wasn't nailed down, and a few things that were. They should have thought better of Victor's friend.

That friend was living in the woods, and had only narrowly consented into claiming a territory near Ax's place. She would eat with them, unless she decided they were just trying to feed her. Garfield got around that one most easily, mostly by finding everything that he decided Ax should try, and openly coaxing Rachel that he wasn't going to get flan just any day. She should at least try the chicken dish from her favorite Chinese restaurant to see if it had changed, because Garfield didn't buy meat for just anybody, and he couldn't tell Ax if it was the same as always. In time, Victor made a few trips out with Garfield, and the two of them would bicker about the relative merits of tofu and meat with a raven looking on impassively.

She could change back to the way she used to be, and usually did for when they actually got to eating. She typically was no use as a model for Ax, though, as her movements with her arms and fingers were clumsy and unpracticed. She was a raven, now, and said once that she never had felt right as a human.

When they learned that Elfangor had been her father, and he had disappeared just when her mother had started drinking… she wasn't much surprised, and wasn't much interested.

Rachel Roth would have been fascinated, and would have grilled Elfangor for days straight about every facet of the way her mother had been, how they had met, and how he had known about her. She would have seen this new development as more interesting than even her books, which now were a dusty pile behind the desk in the barn. She would have had family that cared about her, not only a no-account stepfather that was furious to lose his wife to a traffic accident and be left with her bastard brat.

The new Rachel had turned toward her newfound father with flat eyes, no expression on her face, and asked if Angela had ever wanted a child. On the heel of that, while he was still struggling for a response, she gave a monotonous recounting of her childhood and adolescence. She ended abruptly and morphed smoothly back to raven and flying back to her territory, staying high in the trees even when her friends tried to coax her back down.

Garfield flew up to sit with her. After several hours of sitting in silence, neither mentioned her father again.

She disappeared when they lost Garfield, in a stupid (brave) and moronic (noble) last act of sheer thick-headedness (heroism). Rachel had watched through video screens as he finished the fight, lightning-fast. Kori said afterwards that she would have only been able to hurt Richard's older brother Jason, the leader of the last Controllers. Kori's favorite morphs were aggressive and graceful and deadly, the big cats on land and the predators in the water. Garfield's favorite had instincts that would work with him, instead of against him, and only Rachel had completely followed his blur of fighting.

He was the best of them at morphing, undisputedly. He could change forms faster than the blink of an eye, and his brief stop as a human was too fast to hit. He had taken out all of them but Jason, in the end, and that's when Jason hit him with a blaster shot. Garfield still managed to shift, lightning-fast and just as deadly, but the next hit found his heart even as his tiger claws found Jason's neck, so deeply that he scored along the very spine. Garfield shifted back to human, too fast to catch with the eye, but a third blaster shot caught him—Jason's last act.

Jason fell, heartbeat gone, and Garfield was staggering when he had turned to the camera. (Rachel could have explained that he chose to focus on them, instead of a morph that just wouldn't take. He needed his full concentration to do anything, and the idiot had tried to take care of _her_.)

Rachel, with her flat eyes and unreadable expression, was crying. His last body language was for her, but his last words were for them. "Stay with her."

They tried, but she always had been more stubborn than they were. She disappeared into the wild blue yonder, and no one was likely to find her.

Victor did, in time, but that was because of extenuating circumstances and for a very good reason.

Her name was Rachel Marie Roth, but the memorial placed next to Garfield's only said Raven.


End file.
